Get that rescue disk made. A USB thumb drive will do fine and is actually preferable to CD/DVD imo.

Your degree of compression will depend upon the TYPE of data you have to compress.
Office files and such compress really well.
JPEG photos and AVI videos do not compress well. [because they are already compressed]

Try to have data stored on another partition or drive that is independent from the operating system if possible.

Have Macrium verify the image upon creation, and then once you are done creating the image, restore the image you have just made from the bootable USB stick.

Clint, read my follow up post. I am somewhat confident that it is correct, but it would be nice to be sure.

It's a worse compression factor, but much more "realistic" .
Yes, with the system repair disk and the backup, you should be able to restore your entire computer to its current state. That said, you should still try to mount the VHD files as drives and browse them, just to see if you can access the files. That should provide some expectation that all will be well when you try to restore, but you won't know for sure until you do a restore.

My C drive has about 42 gb of stuff written on it. When I look at the backup it has 4 files totalling about 14.5 gb. Shouldn't it be 42 gb, or is it all compressed.

Mel

Where are you getting 4 files totaling 14.5GBs from? You should only have one single image file from a Macrium image.
Is there a hidden recovery partition on this laptop that you may have included or missed in the image?

DRIVE IMAGINGInvest a little time and energy in a well thought out BACKUP regimen and you will have minimal down time, and headache.

Where are you getting 4 files totaling 14.5GBs from? You should only have one single image file from a Macrium image.
Is there a hidden recovery partition on this laptop that you may have included or missed in the image?

Well, now I am really confused. I got 8 files. What the heck am I doing wrong?

Open Macrium, go to "Backup", then select "Image local drives".
Use the default settings in "advanced Settings". It will use "Medium" compression.
It will create ONE image file. As you can see from the screenshot, my External drive is "E".

DRIVE IMAGINGInvest a little time and energy in a well thought out BACKUP regimen and you will have minimal down time, and headache.

Trying to list the details

I am not sure how to insert screen shots on this forum, but I inserted them into a .doc file and I'll try and upload that.

In that file, the first image is actually the result of my backup attempt. My ext. HD is drive E. The highlighted files are what got saved on this attempt (ignore the top few files).

The second shot is my attempt to create an image via Macrium, and the third shot is when I hit NEXT. I hope it is readable.

Please advise what I am doing wrong.

Incidentally, regarding the inability to recognize my DVD media: I d/l Macrium on another computer and tried to make a rescue disk, and got the same error. Apparently it does not like my SONY DVD-R disk. Do I need a RW disk, or...what?

I went through my Ext HD and deleted all the included S/W, then formatted it to NTFS when I first bought it. If the method Rui has mentioned does not work, you can format the Ext HD to NTFS, then create a new Image.

For those just starting Imaging, the Image app Boot Disk will fit on a CD if you do not wish to "waste" all the unneeded space on a DVD.

First of all, I used the CONVERT command to convert me ext. HD to NTFS. It only took about 10 seconds. I thought I read it should take 20-30 minutes? Am I doing something wrong there? Anyway, it now says it is NTFS.

So, I deleted my prior backups as I want a single file. I then re-ran Macrium and did a new backup. I chose "Image this drive." Once again, it took a 43gig amount of data and the resulting file was 14.5 gb. Again isn't that a huge compression factor? However, on the positive side, it was a single file (which is what I wanted). Also, I have practically no picture, video, or audio files, so perhaps this resulting size is correct?

I have no clue on how to check if it is correct. I will NOT do a RESTORE!